Abstract

These are interesting times for exploration and development of hydrocarbons in Brazil. As is known around the world, hydrocarbon reserves over the last few years—let's say the last 10 years—have been vastly increasing in the most important basins of the country (Figure 1). This increase was accomplished by geophysical activity. To be specific, Brazil has 22 universities that offer degrees in geology and seven new universities with programs in geophysics. They are spread all over the country. Brazil also has dedicated centers for seismic processing and reservoir characterization, research projects ranging from rock physics interpretation to seismic modeling, and integration of disciplines (primarily seismic and potential fields methods) for basin exploration. In this special section, our idea was to integrate as many disciplines and basins as possible in order to show the variety of topics and problems involved in E&P Brazilian projects.